Sherwood, Carrie Miner (1869-1971). Sherwood, Carrie Belle Miner (1869-1972) Civic leader; Cather's friend. Born in Waukon, IA, to James L. Miner and Julia Erickson Miner, Carrie Miner was the eldest of their children. The family moved to Red Cloud, NE, in 1878, where the Miner Brothers store became the largest in town. Cather remembered meeting Carrie there. In 1884, Carrie, her mother, and siblings were confirmed in the Catholic church. In 1888, she studied music at St. Mary’s Academy at Notre Dame, IN. She married bank clerk Walter Sherwood in late 1889; they had two sons. The Sherwoods travelled often in the West, and visited Europe in 1930. They built a new house at 3rd and Seward streets in Red Cloud in 1908; Cather sometimes sent materials for Carrie to keep in its spacious attics. Carrie Miner Sherwood led local Red Cross work during the two World Wars, served on the Red Cloud school board and park commission, and was active in the League of Women Voters and in the Ladies Guild of Grace Episcopal Church. Cather corresponded with Carrie Miner Sherwood throughout her life and dedicated My Ántonia to Carrie, model for Frances Harling in the novel, and her sister Irene. Carrie was one of Mildred Bennett’s chief sources for The World of Willa Cather (1951), and was instrumental in setting up what is now the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud.

Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska, earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process, reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism. She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.

Lawrence, David Herbert (1885-1930) (“D.H.”). British novelist. Born in Nottingham, England, into a working-class family, Lawrence left high school in 1901 to work as a clerk, although he soon secured a position as a pupil teacher and earned his teacher’s certificate at the University of Nottingham. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), was published by William Heinemann while he was still a schoolteacher. After a bout with pneumonia ended his teaching career, he met and fell in love with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his professors at Nottingham. Frieda left her husband and three young children to travel to Germany with Lawrence. After they had settled in Italy, Heinemann rejected Lawrence’s novel Paul Morel as indecent. The publisher Duckworth encouraged him to revise it, and published as Sons and Lovers (1913) it made his reputation. He and Frieda returned to England and married in London in 1914. Lawrence struggled to make a living: The Rainbow (1915) was ruled obscene and withdrawn from circulation, and Women in Love was repeatedly rejected by publishers before publication in 1920. After World War I he and Frieda returned to Italy, settling in Capri, where in 1921 they met expatriate American painters Earl Brewster and Achsah Barlow-Brewster, with whom they traveled to Ceylon in 1922. The Lawrences eventually traveled to the U.S. by sea to the west coast and spent time in New Mexico and Mexico before returning to Europe in early 1923. In July 1923, the Brewsters gave the Lawrences Cather and Edith Lewis’s address in New York City, and D. H. and Frieda, accompanied by Dorothy Brett, visited 5 Bank Street. From New York City the Lawrences and Brett traveled to New Mexico and settled on a small derelict ranch, which D.H. purchased from Mabel Dodge Luhan, and where he wrote fiction set in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. During their July 1925 visit to Luhan’s compound in Taos, NM, Cather and Lewis visited the Lawrences at their ranch. The Lawrences soon returned to Europe, however, where D.H. died of tuberculosis. His literary reputation and fame increased after his death. Cather’s attitude towards him was ambivalent. She liked him personally, praised him as “unquestionably the most gifted writer of his generation” (#1118), and praised memoirs of him by Luhan and the Brewsters. However, in “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), she criticizes Lawrence for failing to distinguish between “emotion and mere sensory reactions” and reducing his characters in The Rainbow to “mere animal pulp.” “Can one imagine anything more terrible,” she queries, “than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in prose by Mr. Lawrence?”

Goldmark, Josephine Clara (1877-1950). American social reformer. Born in Brooklyn, NY, to Polish and Czech Jewish parents whose families fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Goldmark earned a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1898; she then studied an additional year and tutored at Barnard College. Her sister Pauline introduced her to Florence Kelley of the National Consumers League, which sparked her interest in what became her life’s work, social research and reform, with an emphasis on working conditions for women and children. Cather met Josephine Goldmark and her sisters Pauline and Alice (who married Louis Dembitz Brandeis and lived in Boston) when she was on assignment in Boston for McClure’s Magazine in 1907-1908. Josephine Goldmark and Cather became lifelong friends, although extant correspondence is scant. Cather admired Goldmark’s book Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848, and a Family Migration to America (1930), about the Goldmark, Wehle, Dembitz, and Brandeis families during the Austrian revolution and their lives in the U.S. (Josephine’s mother was a Wehle). In later years she and her sister Pauline lived in Hartsdale, NY. Josephine died in White Plains, NY.